No. Don't be silly. The themes of ET & Close Encounters- or indeed Speilberg's first film made when he was 17- were wholly American. It is a well known fact that little green men only want to anally probe small town Yanks. Indian assholes possess no attractions for our more advanced Galactic visitors. This is true even if the Indian asshole in question is Bengali and as boring as shit.
Andrew Robinson, biographer of Satyajit Ray, writing in 'Physics World', takes a different view-
Picture a scenic pond nestled within the confines of a small village in Bengal, its calm surface dotted with lotus flowers. Then imagine, one moonlit night, a spaceship splashing down and sinking into its depths, until the only thing visible is a golden spire sticking out of the water. The local villagers think it is a temple risen from the Earth below. Most of them decide to worship it.
In which case, this is a Hindu village. A Hindu priest would send word to others of his sect. The 'Dipty' and the ASP and the District Medical officer would get to hear. A question will be raised in the Legislative Assembly. A Commission of Inquiry will be appointed. If the thing really is a temple, the Archeological Survey will padlock the place and let it rot for the next fifty years.
Little do they realize that the object contains a small humanoid creature that will invisibly play havoc in their lives.
Sadly, it wouldn't get the chance. Bengal isn't just overpopulated. It also has a vast bureaucracy and a large class of journalists, petty politicians, and intellectuals of every description. Bollywood did get around to making an ET film in 2014. It starred Aamir Khan as PK and is a hilarious satire either on bogus Godmen or even more bogus sickular Bollywood cunts depending on your point of view.
If you think this sounds like an entertaining idea for a science-fiction film, you would be right.
No. If you have a visitor from a technologically advanced planet, you want to match it against the most technologically advanced country or force within a country. You don't want to watch it score off against retarded rustics or demented squirrels or sexually harassed goldfish.
And if perhaps, you were to think it somewhat similar to the famous 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg, you might not be far off either.
Cute babyish alien gets on well with cute little kiddies. Then the US Army turns up.
But this other alien, the one that crash-landed in India and not America, never quite made it to movie screens across the globe, despite being dreamed up in the 1960s by one of the most significant film directors of the 20th century – Satyajit Ray.
The idea was good. The kids love the alien. The ordinary village folk accept it as part of the grand scheme of things. But evil scientists want to dissect it. There is a chase sequence and maybe some dishum dishum and 'item numbers'. Helen plays the tart with a heart whose seductive cabaret dance distracts the evil Professor. Dara Singh flexes his muscles and lifts up the army jeep so the villains can't escape. Hattie the dancing elephant gives a moving speech on Socialist Secular values sans Sexy Shenanigans. Come to think of it, there was a 'Dara Singh on the moon' movie which came out in the late Sixties.
Universal appeal
Born in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1921, the Bengali polymath was not only a film director
like his Uncle, Nitin Bose
but also an established author,
like his father and grandfather and anybody else who owned a printing press or brought out a magazine
essayist, magazine editor, illustrator, calligrapher and music composer.
He had worked in advertising. His music, however, was horrible.
Although all of his films are set in India, the finest of them hold worldwide appeal.
except to Indians
Between 1955 and 1991, Ray directed almost 30 features,
but he won 35 Indian National Film awards. Sadly, despite my protests, Vajpayee's right-wing Hindutva administration refused to give Ray any more awards just because he was dead. True Secularism rejects discrimination against corpses.
as well as short films and documentaries. Many won leading prizes at international film festivals.
His films were intended to win prizes not audiences.
In 1991 he was awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement – the only such Oscar to be bestowed on an Indian director.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Scorsese says 'Taxi Driver'- which inspired a would-be Presidential assassin- is based on a film by Ray. Nobody believes him. Paul Schrader, who wrote that film, had seen no movies till he was 17 years old because he came from a strict Calvinist family. He did a degree in theology and then a Masters in film studies and thus probably had seen Ray's films. But he doesn't mention them as an influence. Instead his 1972 book 'Transcendental style in film' focuses on Ozu, Bresson & Dreyer. The plain fact is Ray, a Brahmo of a feeble type, had no place for God in his films.
Ray also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford:
After Tagore in 1940, Ray was the second Indian to win this accolade.
the second film director to be awarded this honour after his hero Charles Chaplin.
People enjoyed watching Chaplin's movies.
“Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the Sun or the Moon”, said Japan’s iconic film director, Akira Kurosawa, in 1975.
Equally, if you have seen the Sun or the Moon you can skip Ray's films. The same is true if you ever watched paint dry.
On Ray’s 70th birthday in 1991, British film director Richard Attenborough, who had acted superbly on screen for Ray, called him a “rare genius”.
It is one thing to be bored shitless by a 'rare genius'. It is another to have been bored shitless by a stupid advertising executive who hated the notion that some people find movies more entertaining than advertisements.
And in 2021, on the centenary of Ray’s birth, American film director Martin Scorsese proclaimed that his films “are truly treasures of cinema, and everyone with an interest in film needs to see them”.
See a film by Ray and any shite Scorsese pulled out of his arse will look fine to you.
Ray’s many admirers include a number of luminaries from science, as well as the arts. Chief among them was science writer and novelist Arthur C Clarke, who described Ray’s debut film Pather Panchali (1955) – the first of his classic Apu Trilogy – as “one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful films ever made”.
Then people started hinting that Clarke only lived in Sri Lanka coz little brown boys were cheap there.
A founder of econophysics, Eugene Stanley, wrote of the “Bengali genius” Ray in a 1992 issue of the statistical mechanics journal Physica A (186 1) – remarking that the director’s recent death had “left the world immeasurably poorer”.'The term "econophysics" was coined by H. Eugene Stanley, to describe the large number of papers written by physicists in the problems of (stock and other) markets, in a conference on statistical physics in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) in 1995 and first appeared in its proceedings publication in Physica A 1996.' In other words, Stanley was saying something nice about a local lad who had done well.
And today, a leading Indian theoretical physicist, Dipankar Home, says that he is “amazed by the profundity and steadfastness of Ray’s commitment to a scientific outlook, permeating his varied creations”.
Bengalis praise Bengalis more particularly if they are of Brahmo heritage.
Prolific polymath
Focusing on Bengal but also depicting other parts of India, Ray’s films cover everything from village poverty to urban wealth;
but not village pornography or urban rock and roll
they stretch from the 19th-century British Raj to the present-day;
i.e. the 1880s to the 1960s
and they include comedies,
which were deeply unfunny
detective stories,
which were shit
musicals,
which were cacophonous and aimed at kids because why shouldn't they too suffer?
romances
without romance
and tragedies.
which, in context, were hilarious.
Uniquely among great film directors (apart from Chaplin), Ray wrote the script, cast the actors, designed the costumes and sets, operated the camera, edited the film and composed its score, drawing on his passion for Indian and western music.
At least he didn't put on a wig and sing 'happy birthday Mr. President'.
But unlike Chaplin, Ray was not keen to act himself, despite interest from leading Hollywood producers, such as David Selznick. As Ray once explained to the admiring but slightly offended actor Marlon Brando, “No it’s better behind the camera… It would be too tedious, you see”!
Ray was telling Brando he had a low IQ. Also he was American. Americans have no culture.
In addition to film-making, Ray was a sought-after graphic designer and illustrator, and a bestselling writer of short stories and novels,
in Bengal where other Bengali writers were even more boring
aimed at both children and adults.
Adults- like my Mum- ran away after leaving their kiddies to watch 'Goopie' or 'Sonar Kelar' at the Children's Film theater
His first job, from 1943 to 1956, was with a British advertising agency in Kolkata, and he continued writing fiction until his death. His books, which were later extensively translated from Bengali into English, include both detective stories and science fiction, partly inspired by his early reading of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and H G Wells. The Bengali detective he created in his 1965 short story Feludar Goendagiri (English title Danger in Darjeeling) was influenced by his childhood love of Sherlock Holmes. Nicknamed Feluda, the character was also dramatized on screen by Ray as well as being the star of over 30 of his stories and novels. Indeed Feluda has become Ray’s most familiar creation in today’s India, especially with younger audiences.
His son made a few Feluda films but they didn't make much money. I think there is now a reboot which goes straight to stream. To be fair, outside regional cinema- e.g. Sethuram Iyer CBI played by Mammootty in Malayalam- India doesn't seem to have any bankable detective characters.
Fascinated by science
Ray’s grandfather Upendrakisore and father Sukumar were notable writers and illustrators themselves, and both were trained in science (unlike Satyajit).
What passed for science back then. Ray had a degree in Econ from Presidency. He wasn't stupid.
Their stories, comic verse and drawings remain much loved in Bengal today,
but Bengali literature is little loved in India today. Perhaps this was because of Tagore. The young Bengali felt he had to be more boring than thou.
and their influence on Ray is clear from his many films that reveal the director’s lifelong fascination with science – covering everything from physics and astronomy to medicine and psychology.
Why stop there? Why not mention Ray's fascination with meteorology- stuff like is it going to rain today?- and paleontology- e.g. just how old is this hilsa fish they put in the curry?
Perhaps the most famous scene in Pather Panchali shows the curiosity and awe induced in the uneducated village boy Apu by the sound of humming telegraph wires,
I'd be struck by curiosity and awe if the telephone wires down my neck of the woods started to hum.
immediately followed by the boy’s first sight of a passing steam train
steam trains are cool.
scattering black smoke across a field of white pampas grass.
they wouldn't be white to the boy. 'Kaash phool' (wild sugarcane) is a sign of autumn. Soon it will be Durga Puja. The 'Shakti' of the steam train and the 'Shakti' of the electric telegraph are thus unified with a joyous occasion in the Hindu calendar. But, the Mother Goddess is capricious. First the old woman dies and then young Durga. Yes, there will be reincarnation but not for the family if they die in Benares- which is where they are headed at the end of the film. For Hindus, this has pathos and mathos. Thankfully, Ray didn't know what he was actually saying in his film.
And in Ray’s last feature film, The Stranger (1991), an avuncular anthropologist enchants his schoolboy great-nephew in Kolkata with a puzzling question: why are the apparent sizes of the Sun and the Moon in the sky similar, and the Earth just the right size for total solar and lunar eclipses? When the boy has no answer, his great-uncle tells him: “I say it’s one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. The Sun and the Moon. The King of the Day, the Queen of the Night, and the shadow of Earth on the Moon … all exactly the same size. Magic!”
The ancients concluded that the moon must be much nearer Earth. Indeed it is about 400 times nearer as well as 400 times smaller. Coincidence, not magic. Still, Ray captures the bigoted ipse dixit method of argument loved by the bhuddijivi.
Indeed, Amartya Sen has a very stupid paper on 'Positional Objectivity' where he notes
In 1983, in an Indian magazine interview, Ray explained his fascination with science, saying that “this universe, and its incessant music,
perhaps the dude thought 'the music of the spheres' was a real thing
may not be entirely accidental. Maybe there is a cosmic design somewhere which we don’t know”.
Ray was a Brahmo, like Tagore. In so far as there is a 'Witness', there is a design in the sense that viewing requires correspondence to a schemata. There is an esoteric psychology or aesthetic theory corresponding to this in Hinduism. But Ray hated that religion.
Talking about the wonders of nature, he continued, “Watch the protective colourations of birds and insects. The grasshopper acquires the exact shade of green that helps it merge in its surroundings. The marine life and the shore birds put on the exact camouflage. Could it all be coincidence? I wonder. I don’t mystify it either. I think someday the human mind will explore all the mysteries of life and creation the way the mysteries of the atom have been explored.”
So, Ray didn't know about Darwin's theory of evolution. What is puzzling is that Ray's math and stats must have ben quite good because Econ at Presidency was well taught back then (Hannan thought Bengali graduates were better prepared than Americans for Econometrics PhDs). Moreover great luminaries like SN Bose and Mahalanobis were associated with Shantiniketan. Why did Ray remain so stupid? I suppose the answer is that he didn't want to become a Marxist and pretend to understand Kantorovich.
Visitor from other worlds
This attitude triggered Ray’s highly original science-fiction film project The Alien, which was taken up by Hollywood in 1967. It emerged in 1964 from a letter written by Ray to Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka, requesting his good wishes for a Kolkata science-fiction cine-club.
So, Ray started taking an interest in Sci-Fi. My memory is that MGR's 1963 film- Kalai Arasi- had attracted some attention. Aliens send a flying saucer to abduct a nice Bharatnatyam dancer because though ahead in Science they are woefully backward in performing arts. The writer of the film, which abounds in dual roles, was T. E. Gnanamurthy. Clearly Spielberg stole his original concept- right?
Clarke replied expressing admiration for Ray’s films and a correspondence developed, which led to their talking in London after watching Clarke’s collaborator Stanley Kubrick – who revered Ray – directing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ray outlined his idea for the project, and Clarke found it compelling enough to discuss it with another friend Mike Wilson – a flamboyant film-maker and professional skin-diver.
Who had directed the first Sinhala color movie- Ranmuthu Duwa. The underwater scenes were excellent. Clarke was a major sci-fi writer and a close friend of Wilson. With Ray on board, you could have had a genre of diving movies involving submerged spaceships, sharks, etc. shot in the warm seas of the Indian ocean.
Wilson, who was a keen sci-fi fan, volunteered to sell the project internationally.
So, Ray had a concept. But what was it for? Back then, there were American GIs in the paddy fields of Vietnam. One could have a gentle ET which the villagers are cool with but which the evil US Army- or its Dr. Strangelove- wants to exploit.
As already mentioned, The Alien stars a small humanoid creature whose spaceship splashes down in a Bengali village pond where most (but not all) villagers take it to be a submerged temple and begin to worship it. The exceptions include Haba, a poor boy who survives off stolen fruit and begging and who forms a rapport with the alien creature after it has entered his dreams at night and played with him. Another doubter is Mohan, a sceptical journalist from Kolkata, who questions the existence of godly beings. There is also Joe Devlin, a “can-do” US engineer, who distrusts anything he has not personally experienced.
Devlin is in this backwoods area to drill tube-wells on behalf of a dubious Indian industrialist called Bajoria.
an evil Marwari like G.D Birla. Did you know Birla built temples? Not Muslim temples- Hindu temples! Businessmen are very evil because they believe in God and sell things which people want to buy.
On seeing the spire, Bajoria instantly perceives its possibilities as “the holiest place in India”. He offers Devlin money to pump out the pond,
because only Americans can pump out ponds- right?
so its floor can be covered with marble and a marble structure built with a little plaque saying: “Salvaged and restored by Gaganlal Laxmikant Bajoria”!
Thankfully, Chairman Mao sends billions of Red Guards to kill the evil Marwari and to exterminate Hinduism.
Extra-terrestrial visitor (left) Title page of the “Hollywood” script of The Alien, 1967. (right) A sketch of the alien as envisioned by Ray, and drawn by him to illustrate his 1962 short story “Bankubabur Bandhu” (“Mr Banku’s Friend”), on which he later based the script. (Book cover published with permission from Penguin Random House India)
Banku Babu is a much put-upon school teacher. He is teased by the kids and is the butt of jokes at his local 'adda'. Then he meets an alien and tells all the grown-ups who teased him that they have shit for brains.
The extra-terrestrial creature has other ideas though. Consumed with playful curiosity about the world in which it has just landed, it invisibly gets up to all sorts of very visible mischief: ripening a villager’s corn overnight; making a mango tree belonging to the meanest man in the village fruit at the wrong time of year; causing an old man’s corpse lying on its funeral pyre to open its eyes in front of his grandson; and other inexplicable pranks.
So, the alien is an imp- a bit like 'Bat-mite' and Mister Mxyzptlk, both of whom appeared in DC comics in the early Sixties.
Ray drafted The Alien’s screenplay in Kolkata during early 1967, watched by Wilson,
who may have believed Ray was the missing link
who made some useful suggestions, including the golden colour of the spaceship.
Gold is very nice color. Highly suitable for spaceships.
Ray then proposed that British comedian Peter Sellers should fill the role of Bajoria well. He had admired Sellers in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and knew that Sellers had already played an Indian in The Millionairess.
He would soon shoot 'the Party' which Indira Gandhi quite liked
Soon, Ray and Sellers met in Paris over lunch arranged by Wilson, and Sellers apparently accepted the role enthusiastically.
It is one thing to play an Indian bloke in a Hollywood movie, it is another to do so in an Indian movie.
The next stop on Ray’s Alien tour was Los Angeles, after he received a sensational cable from Wilson that Columbia Pictures wanted to back the film. There Ray was taken aback to discover mimeographed copies of his screenplay bearing the legend “copyright 1967 Mike Wilson & S Ray” circulating in Hollywood. He also met Sellers again, then filming another Indian role in The Party, but sensed the actor had developed doubts.
Black-face was ceasing to be cool.
After being whisked off by Wilson to a series of glamorous parties with film stars, Ray left Hollywood for Kolkata convinced that his innovative Indian project was “doomed”.
Dev Anand's 'Guide' bombed in America but did brisk business in India. Ray would look a fool if he got a credit on a piece of Hollywood shlock- 'Green berets' with Brando as as idealistic Peace Corps engineer fighting Hindoooo superstition in the paddy fields of who gives a fuck.
To its credit, Columbia remained committed, subject to Wilson’s withdrawal.
Richard Boyle writes-
'In 1966 Wilson started his third and possibly wackiest feature, Jamis Banda, which, as Clarke describes, 'pitted Hitler's illegitimate son against Sinhalese secret agent Jamis Banda. It had its good moments but the best was off-screen.
One day some innocent German tourists wandering around Galle came face to face with a group of SS officers. They must have wondered what had been happening while they were away from home.'
Hollywood may not have been too keen to do business with a skin-diver ripping off the Bond franchise.
'Before Wilson had completed the post-production of Jamis Banda, Clarke told him of an idea Satyajit Ray had for a vedic science fiction film. Wilson was intrigued by the idea and interested in raising international finance for the project, so he wrote inviting Ray to come to Colombo to discuss matters. Ray was too busy to leave Calcutta, and instead invited Wilson to come there, which he did.
Over a period of a fortnight, Wilson waited while Ray wrote a first draft screenplay. Wilson then sprung into action, setting up a meeting for Ray with Peter Sellers in Paris, and a few months later with Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, who were keen to back the film. Stupidly, however, Wilson copyrighted the script in his name as well as Ray's, an action that sowed the seeds of mistrust in the mind of the director.
The project was transferred to Columbia Pictures in London, to where Ray and Wilson subsequently travelled to try to clinch the deal. This trip ended disastrously, though, with Ray his mistrust fanned by Columbia executives eager to ease Wilson out of the project. For Ray the final blow came when Sellers announced his withdrawal, because he felt his role was not developed enough.
Sellers may not have believed Marwaris were as one dimensional as Bengalis believe them to be.
'Later Wilson was persuaded to relinquish the copyright, and Columbia and others encouraged Ray to take up the project once again. This he never did, instead preferring to blame Wilson for the fact that the film remained unmade. The history of cinema is punctuated by a number of great 'might-have-beens', such as Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!'
'There is little doubt that The Alien falls into this category. The story behind it is a fascinating one - one I have attempted to piece together in my forthcoming book,The Wrecking : The story of Satyajit Ray's ill-fated science-fiction fllm project, The Alien.'
Ray felt that Clarke was the only person who might bring this about. Clarke responded with a letter saying that Wilson had shaved his head and gone off to meditate in the jungles of south India as a monk.
He became Swami Siva Kalki. Sadly, this meant frequent bouts of malaria.
A brief letter from Wilson to Ray finally followed, relinquishing any rights to the Alien screenplay.
But Ray was in no mood to make movies about Jamshed Bonda who battles Hitler's illegitimate son under the waters of the Hooghly.
Striking similarities
For more than a decade Ray was encouraged by Columbia to revive the project and continued to treat it as possible.
There could be a movie set in a distant land featuring a cute creature from outer-space. If nothing else, the thing could be a tax write-off.
Not until he saw Spielberg’s E.T. did he give up hope.
Why? If one such movie does well, others too will do well.
E.T., which began life in 1981 as a Columbia project, had much in common with Ray’s concept of The Alien.
No. It isn't about an impish space creature. It combines Spielberg's 'Close Encounters' with some ideas he had for a horror sequel 'Night Skies'. The genius was to make the alien empathetic and gracile.
First, there is the benign nature of the creature. Then, as Ray told me in the mid-1980s while I was researching his biography, there is the fact that it is “small and acceptable to children, and possessed of certain superhuman powers – not physical strength but other kinds of powers, particular types of vision, and that it takes an interest in earthly things”.
American children are shown as being resilient and autonomous. Also, it must be said, the West has great child actors.
Ray felt, though, that the appearance of his alien was much more interesting. “Mine didn’t have any eyes,” he continued. “It had sockets so the human resemblance was already destroyed to some extent. And mine was almost weightless and the gait was different. Not a heavy-footed gait but more like a hopping gait. And it had a sense of humour, a sense of fun, a mischievous quality. I think mine was a whimsy.”
It was an imp. ET was on earth on some sort of scientific mission but, clearly, wasn't too bright.
Ray could understand the audience appeal of Spielberg’s alien, though he found E.T. “a bit corny at times”.
We go to the movies to eat popcorn and watch stuff which tugs at our heart-strings.
But he did not care for the extent to which the alien had been humanized. “It ought to be more subtle than that,” he said. “But the children are marvellous. Spielberg has talent in handling children; I’m not sure about otherwise.”
To be fair, Spielberg could rely upon an endless supply of very high quality child actors. Ray himself had found it difficult to work with the young boy in Pather.
The first outsider to spot the similarities was Clarke, who described them as “striking parallels”. Telephoning Kolkata from Sri Lanka in 1983, he suggested Ray write politely to Spielberg about the resemblances.
The Americans had plenty of films and TV episodes about alien visitors in the Fifties and Sixties.
“Don’t take it lying down,” advised Clarke, according to Ray. But despite the fact that Ray remained firmly of the view that E.T. “would not have been possible without my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies”, he did not want to pursue the matter further. Ray agreed with Clarke that “artists have better things to do with their time”; and he knew that Spielberg’s view, according to a letter Clarke wrote to the Times newspaper in 1984, was that he was too young to have been influenced by Ray’s screenplay.
Speilberg, as a 17 year old High School kid made a film called 'Firelight' about aliens abducting small town Americans. That was in 1964. It is ludicrous to think that borrowed anything to do with Sci Fi from Ray.
“Tell Satyajit I was a kid in high school
making a two hour long film on a budget of 500 dollars.
when his script was circulating in Hollywood,” Spielberg told his friend Clarke on a visit to Sri Lanka “rather indignantly” – which hardly resolves the doubts, especially as Spielberg in the late 1960s was already an adult getting started in movies.
He got signed to direct TV productions for Universal.
According to Clarke, Ray and Spielberg were “two of the greatest geniuses the movies have ever produced”. However, as Scorsese publicly remarked in 2010, “I have no qualms in admitting that Spielberg’s E.T. was influenced by Ray’s Alien. Even Sir Richard Attenborough pointed this out to me.”
Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' was considered nihilistic . Perhaps, blaming Ray for it helped him. Attenborough and Scorsese are scarcely authorities on American Sci Fi.
Naturally, Ray regretted that his film never got made.
Why couldn't he make it in Bengal?
His only consolation was that the screenplay’s delicate effects might well have been crushed by crass Hollywood production values, especially since the story was located in India.
So, just make the thing in India.
One can easily imagine the fate of Ray’s Bengali “whimsy” in Hollywood hands.
Spielberg made 'Temple of Doom'. Amrish Puri was a fresh face till about 1980. Remarkably, both Attenborough and Spielberg saw his potential. Incidentally, Puri was K.L Saigal's cousin.
Perhaps it was for the best that Ray’s project evanesced like the alien spaceship’s lift-off from the pond in the finale of the screenplay – before the Bajorias of Beverly Hills could pump out the water and get a commercial grip on it.
Come to think of it, the Amrithraj family moved from Tennis into movie productions in Hollywood. Did you know that the role of 'Vijay' in Octopussy was based on Apu in Ray's screenplay for Star Wars?
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